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A Journal News editorial

State Sen. Greg Ball, R-Patterson / Albert Conte / The Journal News

The photo released by the FBI of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing. / FBI via Getty Images

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We have long since abandoned hope of hearing much of anything intelligible out of the mouth of state Sen. Greg Ball, for many years a reliable court jester and firebrand of Albany, yet there is reason to reset the bar lower after Ball’s recent remarks on torture and terrorists, and how to protect police officers. His comments on the former were unbecoming a state lawmaker with serious homeland security oversight responsibilities, and his comments on cop safety were just good old-fashioned hypocrisy.

This is what the Patterson Republican, chairman of the New York State Senate Veterans, Homeland Security and Military Affairs Committee, put out Friday on Twitter after the arrest of Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19: “So, scum bag #2 in custody. Who wouldn’t use torture on this punk to save more lives?” After receiving deserved negative reaction to the tweet, Ball doubled down on his torture endorsement, explaining he has no qualms torturing “mass murdering killers” and terrorists who “play by a different set of rules by manipulating the greatest strengths of our open society against us.”

He added: “… I believe we must give those tasked with protecting us every constitutional and effective tool to do so.”

Tortured reasoning

Never mind that torture is prohibited under a host of well-reasoned international treaties and conventions; the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments” — found in the same U.S. Constitution state lawmakers swear to defend — makes Ball’s plea inconsequential and irrelevant, even if the senator was able to parlay his tweet into an interview on TV.

Likewise, put aside discussion about the efficacy of torture and “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the legal euphemism coined by the George W. Bush administration to justify water-boarding and the like; a new two-year review of U.S. treatment of suspected terrorists and other detainees, released just a week ago, concluded that there is “no firm or persuasive evidence” that using abusive interrogation techniques “produced significant information of value” and there is “substantial evidence” that what was gleaned “was not useful or reliable.”

Besides, we think military heroes and authorities on torture such as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who knows first-hand how torture can cut both ways and against Americans, sufficiently took on the claims of torture-mongers in 2011, in response to claims that harsh treatment of detainees helped lead U.S. forces to Osama bin Laden.

Wrote McCain: “I don’t mourn the loss of any terrorist’s life. What I do mourn is what we lose when, by official policy or official neglect, we confuse or encourage those who fight this war for us to forget that best sense of ourselves.” He continued: “Through the violence, chaos and heartache of war, through deprivation and cruelty and loss, we are always Americans, and different, stronger and better than those who would destroy us.”

Help refused

What was more galling than any of that was Ball’s Boston-inspired plea to restore the death penalty in New York law, for terrorists “and in those cases involving the intentional murder of a police officer, peace officer or an employee of the Department of Correctional Services”; it comes just months after Ball refused longstanding entreaties by police officers and others to back legislation aimed at keeping cops and others from getting killed in the first place.

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Ball recently opposed New York’s new gun-safety and gun-control measures, which include new universal background checks for prospective buyers, plus new firearms and ammunition controls.

Just last week Ball referred to New York’s new protections as the Gov. Andrew “Cuomo for President Act” designed to “score political points with a radical national constituency.” We note that the “radical national constituency” behind expanded background checks and other reasonable protections includes the National Law Enforcement Partnership to Prevent Gun Violence — an alliance of nine major police leadership organizations who took their pleas for broader gun controls to Washington but were rebuffed by gun-lobby supplicants.

The partnership group said in the recent gun-law debate that it “strongly supports expanding background checks to all (firearms) transaction points to ensure that criminals and other dangerous people are not able to access firearms.” No doubt the groups’ oft-voiced plea to policy-makers was inspired by the loss of more than 564 law enforcement lives to gun violence from 2003-2012 — the greatest single cause of law enforcement deaths over the period. Terrorists claimed nine law enforcement lives over the span.

Outgunned cops

The suspected perpetrators in the Boston crimes, including the shooting death of Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier, reportedly possessed an M-4 carbine, a .40-caliber handgun, a 9 mm handgun and a BB gun. The campus police officer was no match for such weaponry. But at least Ball would lend a hand to law enforcement after a tragedy occurs, imposing a death penalty already available to prosecutors under federal law — for those terrorists still alive after an attack.

Ball said in a statement Saturday, “We need our Governor to make the death penalty for cop killers and terrorists a top priority. The death penalty is a fitting deterrent that will act as protection for those men and women who leave their loving families daily and put their lives at risk everyday to protect the rest of us.”